Reading Authors of the Enlightenment at the Cape of Good Hope from the late 1780s to the mid 1830s

With few exceptions, the study of intellectual traditions in South Africa generally ignores their material traces. The embodiment of ideas and languages in books, pamphlets, newspapers and other media does, however, matter. An analysis of the inventories and catalogues of private book collections, subscription libraries and book sales, of minutes of a reading society, and of newspaper articles and advertisements reveals that Enlightenment authors were not unknown at the Cape in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This article explains how their works were collected, circulated and read, unearthing the material traces of Enlightenment ideas, so that it becomes possible to source some of the Enlightenment print culture origins of Cape liberalism

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Cape · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Print culture · Scottish Enlightenment · Sociology · History · Law · Legal Issues in South Africa · Philosophy · South African History and Culture

• Contemporary Critics and Seminal Sources

  Gawie Botma•Media History•2022

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• Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850–1920s

  Open Access•Archie L Dick•Reading Spaces in South Africa,…•2020

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• Knowledge and Colonialism

  Siegfried Huigen•Knowledge and colonialism•2009

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• Die gereformeerde leesstof van ons Kaapse voorouers

  Open Access•Dirk Krüger, D W Krüger•In die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi•1968

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• Human Rights and the South African Legal Order

  Jennifer Seymour Whitaker, John Dugard•Foreign Affairs•1978

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• The Politics of Mythology

  Leslie Bank, Andrew Bank•Journal of Southern African Studies•1999

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